Kat, I appreciate you responding in detail to Ben’s post. I haven’t had time yet to look at all the evidence but will hopefully do that in more detail later. One thing that stood out to me from the appendix:
False, questionable, or misleading claim: “The staff they hire … live in the house with them.”
The other side: False. We no longer do this, and haven’t since Alice/Chloe left ~1.5 years ago. Despite having lived with many employees in the past and it being a good experience, we’ve decided that in the current climate of EA (high amounts of assuming ill-intent), it seems too risky.
This sounds a bit like you haven’t really reflected on whether the setup of living with your employees is a good idea in general, regardless of the climate in EA. In your comment below, you say:
I think it’s valuable to have social experiments. However, I do think the social experiment of living and working with your employees while traveling has now been experimented with and the results are “it’s very risky”. I’ve been doing it with Emerson and Drew for years now and it’s been fine, but I think we have a really good dynamic and it’s hard to replicate.
I liked Holly’s comment on Ben’s original post saying that if we encourage lots of experimentation as a community, it is unfair to blame people if the experimentation goes wrong. However, I think this is conditional on the people in question acknowledging that something went wrong and being willing to learn from it.
I wish there was more reflection and apologising in your post. Just blaming the EA community for assuming ill-intent too often and spending all your energy on debunking as many claims as possible gives the impression that you’re not really taking responsibility for the situation. It seems pretty clear to me that working and living together (especially when going to lots of new places where you don’t have an existing support system) does create a lot of dependence and makes it more likely for your employees to feel stripped of their agency. I think a lot of the things that I find icky from Ben’s post and that still feel icky to me have to do with this dynamic of completely blurred professional and personal boundaries. In the same vein, I agree with Frances’s comment, that including all these photos seems to be missing the point. Yes, you traveled to really cool places together and everyone looks really happy in these pictures, but it is a highly unusual situation to have this kind of relationship with your employers and I don’t find it that surprising that people left feeling really bad about some of the dynamics that played out.
I know it must have been tough to respond to the original post and I understand why you focused on debunking as many claims as possible. However, to rebuild trust in the community I think it would be really helpful to hear more about what your reflections are and how you’re planning to prevent anything like this from happening again.
Hi Luzia. We did acknowledge that we’re no longer living with employees for exactly the reasons you expressed. You can see our “lessons learned” section here. And it’s not going to show up as much in the post, but I have probably spent a full month of full-time work analyzing what happened and what I can do better in the future.
I think we had reason to believe that living and working together would be fine. I’ve done it with many employees in the past and me and Emerson had been doing it for years. However, I do think it’s risky and it’s not worth the cost. I hope other EA orgs learn from what happened to us.
However, I do think that overall, this was small relative to the amount of things they lied or experienced delusions about. We’ve presented hundreds of pages of evidence showing that they told serious falsehoods that were extremely damaging to us.
I think that focusing on our tone or what we did wrong when they’ve demonstrably lied about dozens of claims is missing the point.
Maybe it was unwise of us to live with employees, but they told dozens of falsehoods and misled people in a way that will cause damage to us until the singularity.
Everybody should reflect on what they could do better in the future, and we have. But Alice, Ben, and Chloe have shown zero such reflection, have shown zero regret, and have legitimately caused massive damage that they could have prevented, whereas we lived with employees and hired somebody who’d never been an assistant before and didn’t like it.
Kat, I appreciate you responding in detail to Ben’s post. I haven’t had time yet to look at all the evidence but will hopefully do that in more detail later. One thing that stood out to me from the appendix:
This sounds a bit like you haven’t really reflected on whether the setup of living with your employees is a good idea in general, regardless of the climate in EA. In your comment below, you say:
I liked Holly’s comment on Ben’s original post saying that if we encourage lots of experimentation as a community, it is unfair to blame people if the experimentation goes wrong. However, I think this is conditional on the people in question acknowledging that something went wrong and being willing to learn from it.
I wish there was more reflection and apologising in your post. Just blaming the EA community for assuming ill-intent too often and spending all your energy on debunking as many claims as possible gives the impression that you’re not really taking responsibility for the situation. It seems pretty clear to me that working and living together (especially when going to lots of new places where you don’t have an existing support system) does create a lot of dependence and makes it more likely for your employees to feel stripped of their agency. I think a lot of the things that I find icky from Ben’s post and that still feel icky to me have to do with this dynamic of completely blurred professional and personal boundaries. In the same vein, I agree with Frances’s comment, that including all these photos seems to be missing the point. Yes, you traveled to really cool places together and everyone looks really happy in these pictures, but it is a highly unusual situation to have this kind of relationship with your employers and I don’t find it that surprising that people left feeling really bad about some of the dynamics that played out.
I know it must have been tough to respond to the original post and I understand why you focused on debunking as many claims as possible. However, to rebuild trust in the community I think it would be really helpful to hear more about what your reflections are and how you’re planning to prevent anything like this from happening again.
Hi Luzia. We did acknowledge that we’re no longer living with employees for exactly the reasons you expressed. You can see our “lessons learned” section here. And it’s not going to show up as much in the post, but I have probably spent a full month of full-time work analyzing what happened and what I can do better in the future.
I think we had reason to believe that living and working together would be fine. I’ve done it with many employees in the past and me and Emerson had been doing it for years. However, I do think it’s risky and it’s not worth the cost. I hope other EA orgs learn from what happened to us.
However, I do think that overall, this was small relative to the amount of things they lied or experienced delusions about. We’ve presented hundreds of pages of evidence showing that they told serious falsehoods that were extremely damaging to us.
I think that focusing on our tone or what we did wrong when they’ve demonstrably lied about dozens of claims is missing the point.
Maybe it was unwise of us to live with employees, but they told dozens of falsehoods and misled people in a way that will cause damage to us until the singularity.
Everybody should reflect on what they could do better in the future, and we have. But Alice, Ben, and Chloe have shown zero such reflection, have shown zero regret, and have legitimately caused massive damage that they could have prevented, whereas we lived with employees and hired somebody who’d never been an assistant before and didn’t like it.